Architecture

Cities, town urbanism, town planning, pretty photos of buildings, and the stories behind them.

The car park that ate Footscray

When you take a look at the street network of Footscray, everything looks much like many other inner Melbourne suburbs – a network of narrow streets lined by terrace houses. But if you take a close look next door to the Footscray Park campus of Victoria University, you’ll see something quite different. It’s a sea […]

Hiding the garage behind a false front

As cities sprawl outwards, cars have become an essential part of suburban life, resulting in the humble garage been pushed front and centre of modern house designs, standing out like a sore thumb. But this doesn’t have to be, as these oddball examples of garage design show. The garage hidden under San Francisco house did […]

Travelodge ‘tri-arc’ hotels around the world

Large corporations work hard to present a consistent brand to customers, and one of the ways they do this is with architecture. Back in the 1970s Travelodge did just this, building dozens of identical hotel towers all over the world.

Melbourne’s never built – the top end of Bourke Street

In the mid-20th century there were many crazy plans to rebuild Melbourne as a modern city, and this proposal from the Melbourne Metropolitan Planning Scheme 1954 would be one of the most extreme – the entire top end of Bourke Street would be bulldozed to make room for a new civic square.

Streets to nowhere in Sunshine North

Melbourne is an ever growing city, but only 10 kilometres from the CBD lies a curious grid of abandoned roads, in the industrial backblocks of Sunshine North.

Light industry at Sunshine North